Two Infants Saved From Leukemia By Gene-Editing

Posted on January 28, 2017

The lives of two baby girls with Leukemia has been saved thanks to gene-editing.

Leukemia is a cancer of the blood and is very hard to treat. But thanks to advanced medicine and new gene-editing technology, the lives of two baby girls have been saved. The two babies were saved from an incurable form of the illness.

In a report published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, a team of European researchers wrote that the girls have been cancer-free form 18 and 12 months after receiving unique treatment. The treatment involved genetic engineering of white blood cells to give them the ability to directly attack cancerous cells.

It took the doctor’s 28 days at tops to start seeing big changes in the infants, which is extraordinary fast for cancer treatment.

Today, the two girls live without the illness they were once haunted with, one that almost cost them their lives.

It was thanks to the dedication and hard work of teams at both London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital and Cellectis, a French Biotech firm, that these two girls survived a cancer that is in ordinary cases incurable.

The two babies were in dire need of such a treatment because children that young don’t have many white blood cells to start out with. That is why white blood cells were harvested from donors, and engineered, before being introduced to their circulation.